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You Don’t Need to Use Airplane Mode on Airplanes
(gizmodo.com)
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There's a number of factors that lead to that.
The cell base station antennas have a relatively narrow vertical beamwidth and are typically aimed a few degrees below horizontal. (Aircraft tend not to operate at that altitude)
usable range of each cell base stations is typically <50 km.
Cell base stations are optimized for communicating with mobiles moving less than 90km/h.
Given all that, if you happen to get a signal, you'll be handing off between towers far too fast and too frequently for the network to reliably deal with.